


The Call of the Vanished

by TokyoDarjeeling



Series: Arlington [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Arlington Cemetery, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-27
Updated: 2015-01-27
Packaged: 2018-03-09 08:13:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3242609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TokyoDarjeeling/pseuds/TokyoDarjeeling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve kicks the grass in front of him, and bites back the tears. He spent so much time wishing for a different world, trying to be someone he was not, fighting for things that turned out not to be real, and believing in too many lies. </p><p>What happens when we discover that which should have remained unknown?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Call of the Vanished

Wintergreen moss covers the ground and a group of soldiers are wading through it, dressed for rainy weather and damp, alert to attacks from humans and nature alike.

There is no rain in sight, and on second thought Steve is not sure that it’s actually moss the soldiers are wading through but it doesn’t really matter. The soldiers are perfectly still, captured in motion of a moment long ago, a moment he missed but should have witnessed. Less than ten years after his war, Steve would surely have gone to Korea as well. Instead of walking through the fields of wintergreen, he had been frozen still and today, their roles are reverse.

It is a warm June weekend in Arlington, and Steve is here watching the stories of people he never met and wars he never fought and lives he never lived. He shuffles sideways to turn and walk away, from a memorial of a war that technically still isn’t over, in which he couldn’t make any difference. His eyes linger on the words on the ground, _Freedom is never free_ and thinks that yes, some things never change.

 

_\---…the frightening in the unknown by giving it the power of the ancient, that which we have managed to avoid to see even though it has been there longer than us.---_

All of Arlington is dedicated not to the soldiers, but to the wars. The names remembered are not remembered for their own sakes, or for ours lest we forget: they are remembered as pieces of the war. The thought up images of soldiers in an idealized moment captured in bronze stand as memorials to their respective wars, not their respective deeds or deaths.

The iconic men raising the American flag on Iwo Jima were real. Steve has seen the picture, taken less than a year after his crash. A picture of a world he has never been to, a hell he never visited. Circling it he reads names of places of battles he never read before, struggles he can’t even remember what they were for, losses he can’t be sure were worth it anymore. A childish side of him, a small and innocent side, starts to think that with a list that long, all the wars of the world should already have been fought by now. The soldier that child turned into knows that it ain’t so.

 

\--- _The potential of the unknown to scare grows as we map out the world and the realm of the known: we become frightened of that which we have not yet put on a map_.---

 

The name on the list that stings the most in Steve’s eyes comes shortly after the names he learned through his own familiarization, and quite a bit from the most recent end of the list. There seems to be more monuments for it too, more places of worship for that particularly cruel war. Re-learning the new history was frustrating, all these things he could’ve helped with, all the places where he could’ve been put to use. All these missed opportunities to help, where his land and army stood idly by. But even worse than that, and more painful, were the opportunities to harm that were taken.

Steve has seen the iconic photographs of that war too and they are nowhere represented here in three dimensional bronze. Instead he sees young men of the same sorts he stood by, stand by each other arm to arm, brother to brother in a way they couldn’t do back home. He sees the same diverse assortment of women contributing too – but they are not the women he met and fought alongside. These ones have been eternalized not in images of their power, but in their weakness. He thinks that maybe that is the only way the artist wanted them to be remembered, and resents him (or her) for it. There is no single way for a human to be in a war, Steve knows, and he cannot look at this war without feeling that it went utterly and horribly wrong in all possible ways. ‘Nam. Whatever future was he fighting for, if it was all to be bombed back to the Stone Age?

 

_\---The future is “everything we do not yet know,” with the underlying meaning “everything that we will discover.” But the past is a different matter: it is both that which we know and don't know, and there are no guarantees that we will ever understand or discover what we have missed.---_

Eventually Steve finds his way over to the less grand monuments, the small but equal stones raised for the real and not the fantastical players of war. He knows he walks the ground in which he too will probably be laid to rest one day. Back when he thought his time had come, he could never have hoped for that probability, he knew he was going into a great unknown both physically and not. Yet here he stands now, on hallow ground that he can share more easily without feeling like an intruder.

There are people he knew here, in the old life and the new. There are people he knew that aren’t here except in name. Already when he filed his report of the fall, Steve had put in a request for Bucky to be counted as KIA instead of MIA. He wanted a stone to be put up for him, for his folks, for his sisters. He never got word back on his request in that lifetime, but when he first looked in the registry of Arlington after he woke up, he did indeed find a James Buchanan Barnes there. If he was completely honest with himself, he realized that it was more likely the work of Peggy than him and he sent her a thought of thanks that she had managed to put Bucky to rest, that he too was not still lost after all these years.

How wrong we can be about history, and that which we take for granted. How many are the faults which we are taught.

 

_\---… some things should be left asleep in the dark and refers to the dangers that shall come from waking what is hiding therein. One day the pieces of the puzzle of legends and ghost stories will be put together and that is something to fear, it would be better to flee back into an unenlightened world.---_

 

He learned too, even before he looked in the register, that he had also been given a stone here. Not among his comrades, not among them like an equal soldier like he was and wanted to be, but among the monuments. It had been rather grotesque when he first saw it, and he still remembers it that way even though it has thankfully been removed since his awakening. They actually asked him, if he wanted to keep it? As a memory to his deeds. Steve had answered that he could remember them just fine on his own and didn’t need this sort of monumental help. It was gone, permanently, and if Steve had any say in it the only shape he was ever to be remembered in at Arlington again, was going to be in a small rectangular marble stone among the other real soldiers, not the imagined ones.

In a way you did get your wish Stevie, he thinks to himself. In a way you have a place next to him now. He stares down on the stone that wears Bucky’s name, what he used to be and not what he is now. In a way, you are back together again in this world and not the next. Wishing for something else wouldn’t be right but that’s what he does. He has never wished for anything as hard, not even right after the fall when all he wanted was to have him back. Steve was never careful enough, Bucky used to say. Not even in what he wished for.

 

\--- _We are already forced to participate in reality, in fantasy we can imagine a participation on different terms.---_

 

Steve kicks the grass in front of him, and bites back the tears. He spent so much time wishing for a different world, trying to be someone he was not, fighting for things that turned out not to be real, and believing in too many lies. Wasting so much time and missing too much. He missed out on people, on life, and now he misses missing them. Instead he has to face the things that had slipped him by, the other meaning of the word “miss.” The world was not like he had hoped for or what he thought it was, it was something entirely different, and he was gonna keep missing it if he didn’t try to catch up with it. Bucky wasn’t here, but out there was whatever was left of him. He had missed Bucky once, he had missed him twice and he wasn’t going to miss him again. None of them was going to be left behind.

 

_\---What we have missed could be anything, also things that have managed to avoid discovery and has outsmarted humanity, all its scientists and historians.---_

Wading back through the hills of green and white and steel grey, Steve realizes that war in the end leaves us all behind. War, such an old and crude darkness that eventually swallowed us all up and here its monuments, trying to shine a light on it. The kind of darkness used to drive out other darknesses, the kind that made you want to flee into it to hide from the light of what we had done to each other. Steve had been swallowed once, and Bucky more than that. Steve did not want to run back to it, or from it. He wasn’t going to glorify it in light any longer either. He’d drag its victims out of that darkness and not into another one. However this world that is actually was, it always did more good than one that wasn’t real. This is the world he lived in now. Out in some remote corner of it, Bucky lived in it too.

 

_“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” – The Call of Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft_

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> A semi-sequel to The Island of Doctor Zola. This time I've drawn some inspiration from the opening lines of The Call of Cthulhu, but all other italicized lines through the text are actually from an old essay of mine, on the relationship between horror and science fiction. Seemed fitting for Steve in a way.
> 
> Shout out and thank you's to Hanna and Sofia again. :)


End file.
